A figure in sports journalism and defender of golden football, Didier Roustan was a star of the small screen who knew how to keep his private life away from the cameras.
In almost 50 years of career, Didier Roustan has followed all football. Joining TF1 in 1976, the same year that a certain Diego Maradona began his professional career, he became one of the spearheads of the show Telefoot. Passionate about football and especially about the beautiful game, he continued his journey on Canal+ then at Antenne 2 where he followed the first World Cup victory of the Brazilian Ronaldo. After a short period of inactivity, he joined the L’Équipe channel and then made several appearances on TV5 Monde and Europe 1 Sport. In 2008, he joined the team of The Team in the evening, which he will not leave until June 2024.
A football lover but not only, Didier Roustan also loves players. In 1994, he became friends with Eric Cantona while they were commentating the World Cup together. His career allowed him to meet his lifelong idols, Platini, Pelé, Cruyff, and especially Maradona, with him and Eric Cantona they founded in 1995, the International Association of Professional Players. The first global players’ union aims to protect them from the excesses of a system where money takes an increasingly important place.
He also knew how to protect his private life. Remaining very discreet about his love life and family life, the journalist preferred, throughout his career, to separate the professional from the personal. And above all, to protect the people who were part of his private and family circle.
A disjointed family life
He had barely confided to a few very curious journalists some confidences about his childhood, far from his parents, always on the move. After spending the first three years of his life in Brazzaville, where he was born, he left Congo for Cannes. He was then raised by his grandparents. “I have flashbacks. I remember the atmosphere. When I go back to Africa, I feel at home,” he told Libération in 2006, during a portrait. To the journalist tasked with talking about his daily life and his way of seeing the world, he also said that he had a bulldog called Emma Peel in homage to the heroine of the series Bowler hat and leather boots.
The sports journalist also admitted in the course of a conversation, again with Libé, that he had had a life that was too disjointed to assume the stability of a family life. “I was lucky to have people around me who put up with my crazy outbursts. It does damage. When you see your 3-year-old kid, while you’re leaving for Argentina, who tells you: “Stay there.” It’s very hard,” he said, without saying more.
Claude Martinelli, a childhood friend, is one of those who shared his intimacy: “When he could come down to Cannes for at least a week, we always made arrangements to meet up. We would go and eat at each other’s houses, our children know each other, we shared many moments together,” he recalls for Nice Matin.
His death, which occurred on the night of September 10-11, caused a national outcry, but also in the city where he grew up. The mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, paid tribute to him. “I learned with emotion of the death of Didier Roustan. A passionate Cannes resident, attached to the red and white, he loved football, above all the beautiful game and the beautiful stories,” he wrote on X, adding: “He had invented a new television language around the round ball, filled with positive spirit and poetry.”
Since the announcement of his death on Wednesday, September 11, the world of sports journalism has been paying tribute to him. L’Équipe hails a “bible of sport”, the “president for life” of the show The Team in the evening. Pascal Praud who worked with him at TF1, Anissa Haddadi with whom he worked at Europe 1, as well as Vincent Duluc from L’Équipe and Michel Denisot his former colleague from Canal+ expressed their sorrow at this tragic loss. Didier Roustan died of liver cancer, he was 66 years old.